Honkey nuts (gum nuts)

My wife had picked a large clump of honkey nuts – gum nuts – and had put them into a vase as a decoration for the coffee table. The sight of them took me back fifty years, to the trees behind the lunch shed at John Calvin School in Armadale, Western Australia.

As you walked into the grounds of the John Calvin School in the 1950s there was a gravel quadrangle / yard ahead, At the end of that was a lunch shed. This was a long corrugated galvanised iron shed which was across the yard with the side toward the yard open. In the lunch shed there were long benches and tables made of Jarrah. To the right of the yard there was the main building, with, as I remember, three classrooms. There were ramps rather than stairs leading up to the classrooms. In front of that was the manse, the residence of the minister of the local church that ran the school.

To the left of the yard was an open area with quite a few gum trees. That’s where we played cricket and footy and other games. The school was surrounded by orange orchards. Next to the main building was a tea tree hedge and behind that an orange orchard. Behind the shed and the treed area was an orange orchard.

Behind the lunch shed was a fascinating area. Piled up against the back of the shed was a large stack of those grey cinder building blocks. There was a number of large gum trees in this area, so it was always shaded. There were piles of gum leaves on the stack of blocks, all slowly rotting because it was always damp in the shade of those big gum trees. Snails left their silvery trails along the bricks. And there were honkey nuts. (Honkey nuts, to you ‘eastern staters’, are the same as ‘gum nuts’. Now that I live in Victoria I have come to realise that the common term in WA ‘honkey nuts’ is virtually unknown in Victoria). Piles of honkey nuts. Piles of ammunition. Just the thing for small boys!

Honkey nuts, also known as gum nuts in the rest of Australia. These are still green and on the tree. By the time we got them as ammunition they were brown and dry. They were about an inch to an inch and a half long. Source: Private collection.

One of the things that was part of life at schools in Western Australia in those days was milk. Small bottles of milk were delivered to school during the morning. Enough so that each child had one. As far as I know this was funded by the state government. Little glass bottles with the formed aluminium foil lid, maybe a third or a quarter of a pint. Lots of little bottles in metal crates. They were put on to the long tables in the lunch shed, ready for the kids when they came out to play at recess time. This was in the days before homogenisation, so the cream used to rise to the top. When we came out to play at recess there was a bottle of milk. Never mind the milk … I used to love the cream! Still do, but I have to be a bit more careful in how much I consume now!

© Copyright Willem Schultink